Signs You're on the Right Track

I'm just starting a new project, and it's in that extremely exciting phase where you haven't realized all the traps you've set for yourself, yet, and you fool yourself into thinking maybe you really ENJOY this writing thing, and it's totally going to go smoothly this time, and probably every other time from here on it it will too, since clearly you've now figured the whole thing out.

Fool's paradise, I know. I feel like first chapters in a first draft are like the writerly version of doing whippets or something.

Except, you know, way less fun.

Points of Reference

A few months back, when I still had girl hair, I needed to get it up off my neck.

"Hey, do you have a binder?" I asked the friend I was with.

"What?"

"A binder. A hair binder."

"What?"

"You know, a...I don't know, a ponytail holder."

"OH, a HAIR tie."

Uh, yeah. A binder.

Killing Your Darlings

We're all supposed to do this. Go in with a blood-red pen and slash through all the words that we love--GOD how we love them--but which aren't doing what we need them to.

Maybe they're part of a hilarious scene that connects to nothing else in the larger work.

Or lyrical and challenging and lovely but the character they're describing/being spoken by should be cut from your MS.

Or they're pretty-good, and have one REALLY awesome metaphor buried somewhere in the creamy center, but the entire surrounding scene is just unnecessary, under-baked novel-dough. It's the incipient spare-tire of your novel. Verbal saddle-bags.

The Telltale Laptop

It's sitting there.

I can feel it looking at me. Accusing me of the darkest misdeeds, the foulest of sins. Staring through me with its dead, soulless eyes, the light on the edge pulsing rhythmically...

ONoff.

ONoff.

ONoff.

DEAR GOD, WILL I LIVE THROUGH THE MADNESS I'VE CREATED BY CLOSING THIS LAPTOP?????

Stories vs. "It's a Great Story"

I've been in the middle of a massive edit on my YA novel, which involves reshaping, building things out, finding better motivations...

...and, of course, cutting things. Loads of things. Big chunks of text that I look at longingly because DAMMIT so much of that was GOOD WRITING!

Some of those things are particularly strange for me this time, though, because this book is based heavily on events I went through, on things that, well, happened.

The Liebster Award Blog Hop

One of the best reasons to go to writing conferences: you meet AWESOME people there, people like the truly spectacular Julie Artz. I'm excited to say she nominated me for a sort of "writer's chain letter" blog tour where we get to learn about how we all work (or fail to). With no further ado, let me tell YOU about ME...and the people that come out of my head: 

Can you share one example of how you came up with the idea for a story? 
Well usually I come up with just the tiniest hint of a character. All my stories spin from characters.

One book (that's in a drawer right now) started with "what about a really dorky social misfit who's actually quietly picking off the people she got too obsessed with and who failed to live up to her idea of their 'friendship?'" Teasing out the two girls who wound up as the central characters in the story, and what they loved and hated, and how they got along, and what was actually going to HAPPEN was much more involved, but the story IDEA sort of came to me like a character logline.

Sometimes. Other times I go through something funny or sad or awful in life and I say "some day, when I'm ready, THIS is becoming a book."

What Did You Call Me? On Labels.

A while back, I wrote a piece called "Reasons Women Aren't Funny." The day after it came out, I was sitting in a coffee shop with a writing friend, and because I'm a compulsive spaz and/or JUST LIKE EVERY WRITER EVER, tracking its progress.

"You should write something else about feminism," she said. "I could maybe help you get it into Slate."

Slate was fantastic, of course. I'd burn as many bras as Slate wanted me to burn if it meant they'd take my stuff. But still, what my friend was saying didn't make much sense to me.

"Yeah, but I'm no expert on feminism. I don't even think of myself that way."

"Seriously, Jilly? Your name is basically synonymous with feminism right now."

Really? Because of one humor piece?

The Other Side of the Coin: Listening

Thanks in large part to a piece I published on ELLE last week--about speaking up on hard topics but also listening to them in the right way--I've been thinking a lot about listening, lately.

There's a reason I chose writing as my medium, forever ago: it allows me to be certain that I'm expressing things the way I want to, and that I then get to be "heard" from a safe distance.

"Safe" in this context means "anywhere further away than in person, at which range I have to react appropriately in real time."

I'm really well-adjusted that way.

A Non-Literary Costume For A Fantastic Holiday

I'm an author. Of kid lit and comedy. The two most juvenile genres around (one more literally than the other).

Of COURSE I love to play dress up.

Happy Halloween to all the kids out there. I may be an adult, but I will NEVER be a grown-up.

Naked

Anyone who knows me knows that I don't talk about emotions.

I use sarcasm to deflect them, or skim over them by moving the topic to something else (something sillier), or watch Doctor Who until they recede for the time being.

Generally, I'd prefer to pretend like they don't exist at all.

Which is why I'm feeling a little raw about the essay that went up on Elle today. It's possibly the most "out there" I've ever made myself, and it's unavoidably emotional.

So please read it, because lord knows I don't want to do something so against nature for NOTHING.

Then let's all put our skins back on and make self-deprecating jokes again.

xx,
j

Playing Dress-Up

So I'm in the middle of revisions right now (as you likely know, since I've mentioned it about every third minute since they started), which means I'm doing what any reasonable writer would:

I'm finding other things to do.

One of those is constructing my frankly AWESOME Halloween costume, in which I:

Will transform into this: 

Let me tell you all, so far I'm NAILING it. 

But that's not really the point of today's word-vomit. Today's barely-formed idea is that as authors, we're basically just playing pretend, constructing costumes that we hope pass muster, day in and day out. 

Verbal Tics

A little over a month ago I was lucky enough to receive a critique on a work in progress from a children's and YA agent. I opted to send in the first chunk of a still-unfinished first draft of a manuscript. I figured if there were any major issues that were already apparent, it might be good to know about them BEFORE I had written another 100+ pages; it's always easier to reshape something that you know is totally unfinished, while typing that last word of that last page has a way of immediately making editing more painful (at least for me).

She offered loads of good suggestions, big and small, including this one: "stop focusing on everyone's eyes so much."

She'd only seen 25 pages, but already people's eyes were large, widening, narrowing, blinking back tears furiously, and generally working to convey about 75% more of the emotional content stuff than they should have been.

This is what all my characters look, and think, and feel like.

Hopefully I would have noticed, and been appropriately terrified by, my weird ocular obsession on my own during a good edit, but more than likely more eyeballs than were strictly necessary would have remained on the page.

REVISIONS.

So the current young adult book has probably been revised fully 10 times, partially a couple dozen more. I got it to a point where I wasn't happy with it--when is anyone ever happy with it?--but where I knew that I no longer knew what to do with it.

This is when you're supposed to query, right?

Long, boring, recognizable-to-all-authors story short, I was ready to leave it on the back burner, at least for a little while, because I couldn't fix it alone.

Then I really and truly lucked out. I got COPIOUS notes on the manuscript from an agent, the kind of notes that make yet another revision feel worth it, since I have someone confirming my instincts about where it's going off the rails, and I was able to move it onto the front of the stove again (has anyone ever tried to extend this metaphor beyond the back burner before? It's a little awkward...).

Which brings me to:

REVISIONS ARE THE HARDEST THING EVER.

The Patina of Culture

Oh, that's SO Jungian.

Of course in CountryName social norms are just completely different.

Well the [Post-Modernists/Medieval ruling classes/Oneida Community Members/Basically any other movement-era-group-schoolofthought] were generally much likelier to [pick your blanket statement] than we are today.

I'm not the only one who bullshits this way, am I?

"So Have You Published Anything?"

You've heard this one before, right?

You tell someone you're a writer, and almost the first words out of his mouth are "oh, so do you have a book published, then?"

And yet...no, it's not in there.

Unless, of course, it's "I have some really interesting things that have happened to me--I should write a book," as though the two are even REMOTELY related to one another (okay, they're a little related, but not much, certainly not as much as, or in the way that, people seem to think).

Where's the Line Between "Work" and "Just Work?"

As you likely know by now (follow the very-cleverly-concealed clues, Sherlocks), in my spare time, I like to write.

I'll admit it: I just wanted to throw some Cumberbatch on this post.

That's not true, in my spare time I write. "Liking" it doesn't really seem like accurate terminology. Maybe  "I feel compelled, as in OCD compelled, like if I don't do this, the inside of my skin will itch, to write" is closer to the mark.

And of course even that only makes me churn out so many words a day. Unless it's a really NICE day and a friend wants to wander. That's important too.

Unlike many of my other addict friends, though, writing is also my day job. Some of it is mildly creative, some of it is deathly boring (that's day jobs, right?), but upwards of 90% of what I do relates pretty directly to the written word.

As I mentioned recently, it's pretty much the only skill I have.

But there's writing and there's writing.

New Talents

I've always claimed that I wound up a writer because I'm frankly no good at anything else.

That was true.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, at my company's summer outing to an apple orchard, I discovered my true calling in life: apple bobbing, a pursuit at which I DOMINATE.

It's always good to have a backup plan, right?

What if YA Were More Like Literary Fiction?

I'll admit it. Lately, I've been losing patience. I've become intolerant. Things that used to seem charming are crawling around under my skin like a bad case of verbal bed bugs.

I speak, of course, of the "look at my verbal backflips" tendency in literary fiction.

What if YA were like that? By which I mean, what if YA were so impressed with the smell of its own farts (or just the sound of its own voice, you pick) that it spent hundreds and thousands of words talking about...nothing?

Even during the not-as-brief-as-it-should-have-been, Jilly-know-yourself-better-dammit period when I was trying to write semi-literary fiction myself, I found the long-winded description tedious at best.

I don't really care about all 73 shades of pink and coral and mother-of-pearl and Orange Julius tinting a sky, causing a character to reflect, boringly, on his own mortality and also his childhood. It doesn't change my understanding of the character, or the story, or the writer's ability, to slog through an entire page of an elaborately-constructed metaphor comparing two women's church hats to multi-colored, feathered Parthenons, marching bravely through time and the line at the post office atop their some-also-overly-clever-metaphor-for-hairs. And there's just never that much worth saying about how that one tree looked.

I don't want to read about those things, even when they're done well; why would I want to write them?

Oh god, I'm gonna have to read about SO MANY NATURE MOMENTS.

Shame? Have Any?

When I was younger I was embarrassed pretty much all the time. I was embarrassed of my too-big feet, of my having parents, of the 75,203 things I was afraid of, a list that included speed boats and water parks, and of my own embarrassment, and the way it kept me from being one of those awesome kids who were just cool with everything.

None of you would have liked me. I didn't either. 

Seriously, it was awful in there.

But while most people shed some of the cringing awkwardness of being a teenager as they grow up, I feel like most also retain SOME boundary lines. 

WARNING: Writing Ruins Reading

Apologies for the click-bait title; it's not QUITE as dire as all that.

It's just mostly dire.

Now don't get me wrong--I'm still the kind of person who falls in love with books. Pushes them on every friend I talk to while the afterglow is still strong. Stacks new ones around the house, in tottering towers, all of them "ohmygod I have to read this right now," and none of them capable of preventing me from buying yet ANOTHER title the next time I pass a book store. Thinks about the characters, sometimes months later, as though they're real people who are real-life friends with me, capable of thinking about me back. All of that is me.

But the longer I write, the more I find myself incapable of turning off my "writer's brain" when I'm reading. I'll come across a sentence that's very expository and an alarm starts blaring internally, "INFO DUUUuuuuUUUUUMMP!" Or I'll catch a character looking in a mirror early on, just so the author has a chance to describe the length and texture of her hair, and the deep wells, or velvet pools, or piercing steel of her eyes. Cliche. Easy. Or I'll read a lovely description of something tangential to the story, like a sunset or a puppy's sorrow or abdominal muscles, and I find myself thinking "So? Who cares?" EVEN THOUGH I LIKED THAT PART.

So...Communism?

After a weekend writing retreat, I'm always left feeling the effects for several days afterwards.

Not from the drinking (though yes, also from the drinking--writers love to party, okay?)--from the "living the dream" aspect of it all, a feeling that's in stark contrast to ordinary-life-upon-return.

So...why can't we live that dream all the time?

You know the one, where we all buy a massive house together somewhere stunningly remote, and live in a community of writers, and work and talk craft and get inspired all day, and unwind with loads of cocktails every night.

The view from last weekend's cabin. Picture: Julie Kingsley

Probably someone would need to learn how to chop wood, too. And someone else would want to know a few things about pickling and canning. Just to complete the whole ethos.

The Stories our Stories Tell

A few years ago, I went to my first Renaissance faire.

I was working on a novel in which one of the main characters was a ren faire obsessive. I spent some time on rennie message boards learning about what true die-hards might be doing with their off-season time (apparently some people are sewing costumes, practicing speech patterns, and singing along to era-specific songs MONTHS before ye olde turkeye legges come out in full force), and I dove down multiple internet wormholes about what different classes of people might have worn, how to swear Elizabethan style, and how to construct your own hoop skirt.

But obviously that wasn't enough: I had to GO to one of these things. And since my mother is emphatically neither a dork nor the type of woman who dressed herself up for Halloween, too, the entire experience had never really been on my radar before.

How I missed this is beyond me.

What struck me then--and struck me even more forcefully yesterday, when I headed back to the faire just for fun--was the depth of storytelling that all these individuals are engaging in.

Deadlines

I think we can all agree that few things motivate you to actually open up the word doc and WORK on it as well as a deadline. Whether it's real--you have to deliver work to an editor, or even just pages to your critique group--or totally self-imposed, knowing the "must have by" date is a very effective lighter fluid for the all-important fire-under-the-ass. It gives you a clear sense of how to structure time; knowing where the finish line is lets you work backward, and parcel out your to-do list into little time-packets of however much work you need to get done, in whatever way works best for you.

I may be the only person who thinks of it that way, but then I'm totally OCD.

I realize that the "whatever way works best for you" part is open to serious interpretation, of course. My college roommate rarely started a paper more than 24 hours before it was due. She usually wound up working til some time in the very-early hours of the morning, fueled by a near-constant stream of coffee and cigarettes, but she always got it done, and from what I heard, she usually did a kickass job. She needed to be in a serious pressure-cooker situation before she could be bothered to really focus on the problem at hand.

Hide & Seek

There's a theory that I'm sure many people would vociferously disagree with: that all books are, to some extent, about the author.

No, they're not all autobiographical. They may not even contain a single recognizably autobiographical element (though I think we could have a three-cocktails-and-you-feel-deep-and-smart argument about how much voice--by which I mean authorial voice--says about the speaker, and how, simply by writing what one chooses to write, one might in fact be revealing huge swathes of personal information, even if the subject matter happens to be vigilante space-puppies). 

Even then, though, the author is putting him or herself onto the page in important ways--the habits the mother in the story has, say, or the speech patterns of the best friend, or the side-character's vocal disdain for disposable diapers and vaccination. Those characters are all fictional, their tics imagined, but they probably have one or more real-life models, and when those models are drawn from an author's life (and where else could they be drawn from, really? Space-puppy reports to command base?), they of necessity tell us something about the author's background, worldview, or relationships. Sometimes the mother is being modeled after a woman observed in the park, and sometimes she's Mommy Dearest, but she probably got that particular way of pinching her nose to bottle a sneeze from some (more or less) known entity. 

Pretty sure the resemblance to dear old Mom isn't always accidental

So what's an author's responsibility to the people s/he knows? 

Your Best Procrastination Techniques: GO! When You're Ready, That Is...

It didn't even hit 10 AM this morning before this Monday felt like a particularly aggressive, spiteful, headache-inducing, cocktails-required Monday.

What option does a girl have when faced with such a day other than procrastination?

I don't know about you folks, but I'm motivated to do my best procrastinating in two specific circumstances:

CIRCUMSTANCE 1: Nothing is really due, so why worry about getting started?

CIRCUMSTANCE 2: Everything is due yesterday. But I'm telling you about it today. You'll make time, right?

What Kind of Editor are You?

Partially because I'm hoping to some day soon be working with a professional, I-work-at-a-publishing-house, this-is-my-day-job editor--and even more because I've been forced to deal with I-know-better, how-about-I-just-rewrite-your-work, emphatically non-professional editors at my current day job--the idea has been rolling around my brain lately: what kind of editor am I? What kind do I need?

As far as my personal editing style, I think I'm best at the small picture. A sentence that's not working right I can spot--and fix--in a blink. Paragraph and even chapter level problems are easy-peasy (is it too long? too short? not following? I know the answer).

What's harder, and what I've been trying to train myself to do better, is seeing the forest for the trees.

In Touch/Out of Touch

Well, it's official.

I can't be trusted anymore.

That's because today I have officially crossed the threshold of being-30, a.k.a. out of the realm where I can reasonably claim to be "too young" to understand things (let's be honest; there's something about that 3 at the front of the decade that makes one seem irrevocably adult, at least as far as expectations go).

I was hoping that the trade-off would be that I woke up magically comprehending escrow, but that part still hasn't kicked in. Maybe that's a turning-40 thing.

Honestly, I'm not particularly freaked out about the number--I'm hoping they'll learn to do things with Botox within 10 years that will keep me from ever REALLY aging meaningfully--but there is a concern tied to my biological clock that goes beyond vanity, or even the possible (though not plausible) compulsive desire to eventually breed:

The older I get, the more out of touch I am.

How I imagine teens now see me.

Are You Living in a Comedy or a Tragedy?

There are two kinds of people, people who come up with arbitrary splits that are supposed to tell you something that's not totally inane, and people who think these "two kinds of people" lines are trite, simplistic, and annoying.

BUT.

There are also two kinds of people, I heard recently, and for once I tended to agree: people who think they're living in a tragedy, and people who think they're living in a comedy.

I'm definitely the latter. In the moment, of course, I'm as liable to get frustrated, or melodramatic, or just plain sad about the awful things--death and casual cruelty and the bus being really, REALLY late--but when you look at it from a bird's-eye view, doesn't the whole thing just seem like a loopy Tom Stoppard play?

The way I see it, there's nothing--truly nothing, and yes, I'm including very hot-button issues under this umbrella, like for instance the big-r-as-in-"R__ is never funny"--that you can't make funny. It takes some time, both to gain perspective and because raw flesh isn't tough enough to stand up to the razor-slice of a cutting joke. But if you ask me, the general absurdity of human existence (because cosmically speaking, just about everything we DO is absurd) means that even our pain can be mined for humor.

The "What's Your Writing Process" Blog Tour!

I was chatting with my writing partner and my agent last week (confession: I set up this sentence just so I could say "my agent," which still feels magical and almost illicit, like saying "my boyfriend" after months of does-he-like-me, or "my pony" if you're the kid whose dream actually came true), and she brought up the idea of blog tours as an additional way to promote a book.

I promptly admitted I had basically no understanding of blog tours. I've seen them, of course, but I have no idea how one sets such a thing up. Do you just call up the blog and offer to stop in and read from your...no, that's wrong. No one has given their phone number to a stranger on the internet since the early days of AOL chat rooms (and then only because you were the person who was ACTUALLY 11 and were really, really stupid, even for 11).

Which of course meant that less than 24 hours later, my awesome writer friend Julie Artz--author of amazing MG adventures and a great lady to grab a cocktail with--asked me if I'd be interested in doing one. Thanks, karma! I must be helping all the old ladies these days!

Anyway, Julie's tour is about writing process, something I mostly don't have. Without further ado...

Fantasies

So part and parcel with taking a first major step towards being a "real" author (let's not waste time arguing this one and all just accept that I'm still mostly faking this) is spending more time than usual watching the fantasy film reels.

You know you have them too. The Walter Mitty moments that you occasionally let yourself play out, where you charm Jon Stewart with your amazing wit (because clearly he wants to talk about your pointless humor book on The Daily Show) and he loves you so much he makes you a regular correspondent, or you sell enough books that you get to quit your day job AND take a real vacation, or you even just see someone reading your book on public transportation and feel overwhelming satisfaction at knowing that person paid to read the words you wrote.

I mean, they don't all have to be EPIC fantasy, right?

I wonder though, how much "it's possible that if everything goes well I might..." is positive, and how much is negative.

Big News (No, Really)

ICYMI, a series of letters I learned just last week means "in case you missed it," I had a serious announcement this weekend:

I finally signed with a literary agent, namely Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa. In fact, I just sent off the contract to the last person who needs to John Hancock it up.

It's for my humor writing, and it's with my writing partner Mike MacDonald (who founded The Smew, the satire news site I wrote for and eventually helped edit a few years back). In a total bonus move, though, Dawn also represents Young Adult, at least if you're already her client (and may eventually regret telling me that).

You see a lot of these blog posts--the "it's finally my agent soul mate, and in the end, it happened so fast!" posts--but that's kind of how it was. I sent in a query on a Tuesday morning, Dawn got back to me within the hour requesting materials, and by the end of the work day, we were setting up a Skype chat for Thursday night. We chatted about all kinds of book-related things, and life-related things, and while I am 100% sold on Dawn's expertise and her track record, the thing that made it feel so right was her personality (cynical and mordant, practically a pre-requisite for getting along with me) and her enthusiasm. She GOT this book. She loves it. What more could you ask for?

So enough gloating. I'm feeling super-effing-lucky, and it was a fairytale in the end, and dreams come true, sometimes even before you turn 30 (just barely), blah-blah-blah.

The happiest of endings...

But I want to put something out there that I think people don't say enough, and that, as a writer who's still in the middle of the endless-rejections-from-agents phase of your career, you need to hear:

It only happens "overnight" after a LONG slog of nothing happening.

How do you Deal with Failure?

I have a confession that is painfully evident to anyone who knows me: I'm a perfectionist. I like things to be a certain way, I get very hung up on the details, and I believe--deeply--that there is usually a "right" way to do things.

Maybe not in life (or in my house cleaning), but certainly in work. Whether you're building artisanal cheese boards or working as an accountant, do it well. Don't be sloppy. Check, then check again.

This even applies to my text messages and gchats. Usually I double check and copy-edit them...

...and when I hit send too fast and miss something, I follow up with a "sic" to whomever I'm corresponding with. Because I hate the idea that they think I'm sloppy THAT MUCH. (No, I'm not kidding about this.)

I think this is my factory setting, but I also think the drive towards perfectionism was reinforced by rewards. Growing up, I was bright, but if I was also anal-retentive, I could be the best. I could get a perfect score on every test and paper, get the right grades, get into the right college, and generally attain all the rubber-stamps of approval I could want because I was, in my dad's words, "disciplined." Obviously this character trait had serious downsides--like several years of "eating" diet coke for lunch--but by the time they started showing up, it was too late. I was stuck on this track, and why, really, would I want to get off of it?

So I must be a masochist.

Why The CENSORED Wouldn't You Say CENSORED?

Let's just lay it out there: I swear like a sailor.

I'm totally capable of turning off the flow of four-letter words and inappropriate descriptions; I used to be a nanny, and my mother is far too Midwestern to let me get away with saying anything network TV wouldn't approve of, at least without me preemptively pardoning my French, or her post-emptively chastising my "language, Jilly"

Read: it's easier to just cut swears out of my discussions with my mom.

Barring those phone calls, I can express myself without any of my more colorful turns of phrase, of course...but why would I? Deployed correctly, they so perfectly capture not just what I mean, but how I feel about what I mean. Besides, I write comedy (among other things)--if the occasional swear offended me, or if I wasn't willing to push against at LEAST the "appropriate language" envelope, I might as well just give up now.

Or resign myself to the Reader's Digest jokes section, permanently.

A horse with BANGS? Now that's WACKADOODLE!!!!

The Halfway Slump

Let's just start by saying writing is HARD.

All those  people who are all "oh my god I just get so INSPIRED, and I pour out an entire novel in a week!" are either lying, or writing REALLY terrible novels (also known as "first drafts").

As I've mentioned a-multiple-of-five times, I'm pretty OCD, so I tend to write fairly clean drafts. They're probably not working all that well, and there are definitely huge sections that should be cut, or added, or moved, or just BETTER, but the prose usually makes sense, and grammar has been employed.

This means I'm not--will never be--a true "burst of inspiration" type. In fact, I think that type has been made up solely for magazine-bios and romantic ideas of life in a garret. I don't care how good you are (or even how much mess you're willing to tolerate in your drafts), there comes a point in a book where you just say "wait, NOW what?"

Just...don't look down...

Pain Plus Time...But How Much?

There's a cliche among humorists: "comedy equals pain plus time."

The idea behind it is fairly simple: you can transform any experience--even a terrible experience--into something totally different, but you need to let it sit awhile, first.

Lately I've been wondering if maybe it applies to all forms of art. I feel like "pain plus time" is probably a reliable formula for tons of great literature, amazing songs, and stunning works of visual art, too.

But how much time do you need?

I think medium matters (for example, it's probably fair to assume a good breakup song could be written sooner, relative to the event, than a good breakup novel), so let's just stick to the one I know: writing.

How much time should you give pain--or fear, or trauma, or any other negative-but-powerful experience--to incubate before you try to give shape to it artistically?

Ideally let's avoid this.


I'm sure a lot of this depends on the person, but I think for most of us, there's a risk in trying to "tap" an experience too soon. My first-ever-novel-no-you-can't-see-it had a climactic scene that drew heavily on a specific, traumatic incident I went through in college.

But I started writing the book my senior year OF college, at which point I was still in the thick of  fallout from said event. I'd finished the first--and second, and third--drafts way before I really understood how I felt about what happened (in fact, I finished them before I'd actually worked through the actual real-life-physical consequences, to say nothing of the emotional ones).

So for me, at least, "two-ish years, during which you've made no effort to sift through the experience" is firmly on the "not long enough" side of the line.

The novel I'm shopping now, on the other hand, deals with something that I knew I wanted to write about the moment it started unfolding (it's based loosely on the events surrounding my father's death).

But I knew I couldn't, yet. Instead I jotted down details--scenes that were too crazy to be made up, moments I wanted to be able to look back on and say "oh dear GOD I'd forgotten how totally effed that was"--and sat on it.

For a little over five years.

I know that said novel will still benefit greatly from the molding of a hands-on agent and/or editor, but I feel much more confident that I've actually distilled what happened--chosen the important parts, picked out the emotional details that are most true and necessary to put on the page, found a few places where the whole mess was, in fact, funny.

It's not just a muddle of regurgitated hurt anymore; I've gotten far enough away from it that I can pick and choose from among my memories, lay them over a different scaffolding, and see that the story might need something that the experience didn't necessarily give me.

Apparently somewhere between two-ish and five-and-change years is my magical "okay, I can work with this, now" line.

New Essay on The Toast!

...and it's on one of the earliest works of western smut-lit.

The funny part is that in the end, the book--which, incidentally, would barely get a PG-13 rating today--reads as...dare I say it...feminism??

Here, let me show you what I mean:

Do Your Dreams Ever Have A Plot?

The other night I had a dream that involved two weensie kittens, the smaller of which I saved from certain death through my incredible milk-doling-out-dream-skills.

Dream me didn't have her nails did, though.


I'm not going to bother to try to tell you more about it, because it's a universally-accepted fact that there is nothing on earth more boring than someone else's dreams.

Except maybe young children's baseball games. Those are DEADLY.

That's gonna be another strike.

But sometimes--super rarely, but occasionally--my dreams unfold like an especially awesome children's story (I'm far too immature for them to unfold like an adult story, all layers of meaning and expansive description of setting and lyrical, but often aimless, prose--in fact, this is making me start to think the not-well-plotted dreams are just the literary fiction of my sleeping self...WHOA...).

Leaps of Faith

So here's a question for you creative-types: do you trust your talent?

Do you even trust that you HAVE talent?

I feel like there's a conundrum at the heart of any creative endeavor: on the one hand, we're profoundly fragile people, sculpted out of spun sugar and butterfly wings, ready to fall apart at the first breath of whispered criticism.

A portrait of the artist.

On the other hand, we're arrogant enough to try to create something in the first place, assuming people will want it, even (maybe) want to pay us for the privilege of it.

Sure, there are folks who walk around telling you what an amazing talent they have, and how they just refuse to waste it on less-worthy forms, and how everyone is dying to work with them, and how they would never get out of bed for less than $Large#.

But I'm not those people. I don't even like to be AROUND those people.

The First IMPORTANT Book You Read

I remember dozens of books from my childhood.

I can picture myself breezing through any of the interchangeable dozens of American Girls books my mom had been forced to buy us on the dark, carpeted hallway that led to my father's tiny den. Or see me and my sisters snuggling up against my mother as she read us Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, or cried through Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember gloating about the 437-page length of Amy's Eyes (though I now have no recollection whatsoever of what the book was about), a book I was directed towards after I exhausted my elementary school library's stock of John Bellairs stories, starting with The House with a Clock in its Walls.

But everyone has a FIRST most-important-book. A book that changed things for you, made you a reader, somehow inflected the literary life you've had since. 

"The Artist's Temperament?"

I should probably recall many significantly more important things about the class I took on Vladimir Nabokov, my junior year in college, but the detail that has stuck with me the most wasn't about his expert use of language, or his uncanny ability to get us to sympathize with monsters, or even his amazing adriotness with puns (though that obviously stuck with me too): it was about his family life.

"Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Nabokov," my professor said, quieting the room with an intense gaze (side-note: GOD was he beautiful--my entire love of literature may just be a displaced crush on this professor), "the most unexpected, the way in which he is most unique among writers of his caliber, is this:

"He was happy." 

Let's be honest: I just wanted an excuse to put up a picture of David Tennant 

I'll Never Let Go, Book! I'll Never Let Go!

So after a few months of "research" reading only (which amounts to SOME legitimate touchstone-choices, and quite a few this-candy-tastes-good YA reads), I was feeling a bit intellectually guilty.

Stupid Slate article messing with my head (because I can admit this much: I'm defensive first because I think she's totally uninformed and wrong, but second because I fear there's some grain of truth beneath the total wrongness).

So I picked up a grownup book a friend was vociferously recommending, and which, as a Pulitzer-winner, I should have read a while back, anyway: Olive Kitteridge. 

I am shocked at how much I'm loving this book, especially since it's structured as a bunch of short stories, a format I rarely respond to as readily as I do to the full-blown-novel thing. I'm totally absorbed. I even turned off the Real Housewives to get back to it last night.

I know. Whoa.

Conferences?? Conferences.

Is there anything more bittersweet, more simultaneously-maddening-and-invigorating, more hungover, than a writing conference?

Or any conference? I feel like they're all this way, at least as far as the hangovers go.

I only started going to these a year ago, and I'm horrified I didn't start sooner. They're like miniature doses of grown-up summer camp. Every person there--at least at the writing conferences I've picked out so far--is passionate about this stuff, ready to talk about books, and craft, and their projects, and your project, and whether or not literacy is really declining, and whether or not that makes any difference in our opinion of The Hunger Games.

(Answer: who cares, that book was fun.)

Every time I go, the dream of doing this full-time feels brighter, more vital, and more in reach (yes, even after a tough critique) than it did before...

...but my life feels that much worse when I get back. Not least because a bunch of writers without any real responsibility are gonna go out for a BUNCH of cocktails. Monday morning does not look bright after five days of too much bourbon and too little sleep, I tell 'ya.

Conference-land is like a playground, filled with witty conversation, interesting people, and did I mention all the drinks? It makes ordinary life seem so dull by comparison. You mean I really have to still do THIS? Every day? Until indefinitely?

You can't be serious.

If only I had endless money (and vacation days) to spend on endless conferences.

Since I don't...I'd better get writing.

The Lowest Form of Humor?

I'm heading to the Yale Writer's Conference this weekend, where I'll be joining a bevy of fellow authors in a humor workshop.

Of course we've all been emailing in advance, figuring out where we'll meet, and what we'll do, and how long it will be until we can drink, and of course it led ME to respond the only way I know how:

Terrible puns. Specifically, in this case, on kindred spirits vs. drinking spirits, but there have been a lot of emails, and therefore, a lot of terrible punning.

In one of the first classes I took in college, "Wit & Humor," we read Freud's book The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (as you might have guessed, it was a laugh-RIOT). In a series of profoundly unfunny--and often super-bigoted--examples, Freud laid out his theory of humor: what causes us to experience something as humor, what it means about our desires for our parents, you know, the usual Freud stuff.

I know the first thing I think of when I hear "Sigmund Freud" is "laugh factory"

Tucked away among his many blanket pronouncements on a form he was clearly incapable of producing, Freud ranked different forms of humor. Wordplay, I believe, was considered the "highest" form of wit.

Punning was considered the "lowest."

Which always confused me, because I would think of punning as a sort of wordplay-subset, the squares within the larger category of wordplay rectangles, so to speak (i.e., all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares).

Either way, I took umbrage. I did and do LOVE puns. Especially bad puns. The kind where you groan first, and MAYBE laugh second. Maybe.

I know I'm not alone in this. Nabokov was indisputably one of the best English-language writers in the last hundred years, and just as indisputably a pun-lover. According to my Nabokov professor, an especial favorite was delivered when a nun, attending one of his lectures, was offended by some back-row hanky-panky between a pair of students.

Dreaming up his next sweet-slash-lame burn...

"Sir," she fumed, approaching the lectern. "How could you carry on your lecture when those two young students were...spooning there?"

"Be grateful, madam," he said, ever the gentleman, "that they weren't forking."

Please tell me I'm not the only one who unabashedly loves punning. I've always thought they add flavor to otherwise dull conversations (but then I'm often in poor taste...).

Grown-Up Reactions to Kid Lit: Eleanor & Park

Jilly:  So can I just say up front, I'm always pre-skeptical of books that are set in the recentish (read: around when the author was probably a teen) past for no particular reason.

MK:  Ha. That's probably fair. It's hard to view recent history as appropriate for historical fiction.

Jilly:  I mean, so the author knows which bands would have made Park appropriately "cool" for 1986 Omaha. That's not enough of a reason to choose that historical moment

MK:  Okay, but I do think putting your characters in a mixtape era makes sense. It's hard to get that kind of visceral pull in a contemporary setting. "Here, I made you this spotify playlist."

Jilly:  Agreed. And it would be hard for her to get the same level of cut-offness for Eleanor. The concept of having no phone line--period--is just difficult to conceive of for any socio-economic level, these days

MK:  Yes. It's a fantastic marker for her poverty level. Although I wonder how well that works for an actual teen reader. The idea of not having a Walkman as a socio-economic indicator.

Jilly:  Well right, that's the thing that always knee-jerks me on recent-past books; the hallmarks you use may work for a crossover adult audience--the visceral feel of a mixtape you mentioned, the poverty level, the Smiths being cool--but they don't resonate for modern teens precisely because it's nothing they've ever experienced. I BARELY experienced that, and I'm an '84 baby. A 2000 baby is so far past it that it may as well be 1940s Russia, or 1804 Jane Austen

MK:  I think teen readers overlook those, though. The emotional pull works even if you're glossing over the references that don't really work for you.

Jilly:  Well she does totally nail the feeling of falling for someone. There's hardly even a plot, but I couldn't stop reading, and I think it's 100% because her descriptions of what it feels like (as per her own promise) let us remember what it's like to be that age, and be in love. Which I think applies even if you are that age--nostalgia for experiences that might be currently available is legit, too

MK:  Absolutely. I'm ordinarily not a huge fan of alternating POV (I get confused really easily, as I did whenever she shifted within a single chapter), but I love the way she captured how anxious they both are about themselves and each other, but how little they understand the other's emotions.

Jilly:  Right, and the momentousness of it all. The sense that you can't get enough of this person and it's almost physical: the desire to EAT Park; the embarrassment at being with Eleanor, but simultaneous inability to stop touching her hair; the sense of having no control over your experience because of this other person.

MK:  And the experience that suddenly your body isn't even your own because you never had someone touch you before. I think Park's viewpoint is really strong in that regard--he's just consumed by these relatively innocent touches and can't even handle thinking about going further.

Jilly:  Which I think is a good counterpoint--not that teens should think sex is taboo, but the idea that all boys always want only sex, that they CAN'T be embarrassed or nervous or unsure about it, seems negative to me

MK:  YES. It is very very rare to get a male POV with a budding relationship that isn't all about being horny.

Jilly:  But do we think boys would ever read this book? You would know more about this, as a librarian who actually ENCOUNTERS teen boys. I mostly avoid them on buses and sidewalks.

MK:  I think the cover would detract a lot of boys. I think there are absolutely boys who would read it on recommendation, but it reads as a little girly.

Jilly: And the write-up is all about romance, which just vibes "girl" at any age.

MK:  Which is really too bad, because I think there are a lot of other ways to sell the story.

Jilly:  Right. The cultural disconnect, and feeling of outsiderness that both characters have is definitely something I could see having cross-gender appeal to a sensitive, Park-esque boy, at least.

MK:  The music, too.

Jilly:  Totally. Okay, so here's my elephant in the room: do we buy that a teenager as seemingly cynical as Eleanor  would believe she's in love? I may have been the only teenager ever with this particular brand of precocity, but I definitely remember feeling--AT THE TIME--that teenagers weren't REALLY in love, and that it was kind of idiotic to call things that.

MK:  Oh I don't think she believes that at all.

Jilly: But don't we think the three-word postcard at the end had to be "I love you?"

MK:  See, I don't love that ending. Because I totally buy her thinking they're doomed from the start.

Jilly:  I didn’t either! It felt like a cop-out to me. Like a concession, rather than what she really felt would happen

MK:  That's a really apt way to put it. Writing the postcard feels like her giving in.

Jilly:  Both the author AND Eleanor

MK:  Yes!

Jilly:  I have to Giver this one (which is my way of saying ask about the after-the-end): do you think they get back together?

MK:  (My mom loves to Giver.) I think the ending implies that they do, which is super unfair.

Jilly:  It seems like kind of a cowardly ending.

MK:  I really think it's a disservice to the rest of the book, which gives a lot of room for things to be uncomfortable and unsettled.

Jilly:  And it closes off a much more realistic experience, to my mind: you will love someone first, and you will probably lose them. Not losing them in a way stiffs the characters. Do they not grow or move on? It amber-seals them. I feel like that's what first love did for me: it may or may not have been real, but it taught me about ME.

MK:  Yeah. I think the rest of the book does a really good job at showing you that "love" doesn't fix the rest of your life, it just provides a little cocoon from it for a while.

Jilly:  And it shows that even in still-loving relationships--like Park's parents'--love isn't that intense for long. They kiss every day, but it's as much habit as passion, I feel like.

MK:  Good point.

Jilly:  Overall, though, I loved it. She flubbed the landing a bit, but it was a really touching book.

MK:  Agreed. 

What's Best for Creativity?

This morning, I woke up extra-early for work, like I do everyday, so I could spend at least a few precious minutes staring at my computer, working on the next novel (I obviously find plenty of time to do not-work at my job, but the kind of focus that I need to work on a novel vs. an essay or a blog is just...different).

Feel free, at this point, to pat me on the back for being saintlike in my devotion to my craft. That half-hour of zombie-staring at a screen, then frantically typing a few sentences I'll fiddle with, slowly, the next morning is pretty much heroic.

But since today is Friday, and my body clock just doesn't want to be in bed before 12 or 12:30 most nights, I was extra tired.

Stupid tired.

So of course I thought it would be a good idea to introduce a second maybe-love-interest to a story in which I intend there to be zero actual romances.

Terrible idea? Or best idea ever?

That depends on me, of course, and whether my skepticism towards teen romance (which I maintained EVEN AS A TEEN) will win this fight; but it did get me thinking (slowly, thickly, rusty-gears style): when do you get your best ideas?

There are a lot of tired maxims about creativity: "you'll get great ideas in the shower," or "the best ideas come when you least expect them," or "write drunk, edit sober."

Is there any truth to any of them? Is my brain's being so painfully tired that I think, right now, I can actually feel it throbbing, a good reason to trash everything I wrote this morning...or to trust it? Should I start pulling out my computer around the start of cocktail number two?

What's the best state to be in to GET ideas (obviously this is all personal)...and what's the best state to be in to execute them?

Speak, Memory...Please?

Does anyone else have a memory like a steel sieve?

People talk--regularly--about how they can remember "every detail" of some event or other, about how they can smell the smells, and see what they were wearing, even recall which member of N'Sync they were most into at that exact moment...

...so much of the time, I feel like I'm working off snapshots from a very poorly-documented slide reel stuffed somewhere in a parental attic.

Sure, I remember SOME stuff. Kinda. Sometimes.

But especially when I talk about my childhood, I feel like a sense of texture is missing. I can imagine myself in my dad's den, staring into the weird half-height cupboard crammed full of little-kid books I'd sometimes read anyway; or I can picture the Slim Jim can Perek and I cut a hole in to use as our "club dues" bank, sitting on a shelf of the spiderwebby shed; I even remember staring contests with the mounted mountain goat head in the basement (Perek and I got bored sometimes)--I see moments, and if I tried, I could probably sort the photos into a mental album that was roughly chronological, but I don't remember what it felt like to be any of those people.

Do other people have a sense of what they actually were at different ages and stages that I'm just totally deficient for lacking? Or is this normal--to have a collection of discrete moments as your past, not a film reel?

Either way, I find it upsetting. There's such a tangible loss.

Not of anything big and important--although I think my memory gaps the most around the kinds of "major" events I think people would expect me to remember (my friend Kathleen Hale and I were talking about this lately, and I have a sense that my memory seeming to have an at-will erase button isn't the default for everyone)--but a loss nonetheless.

I was a kid who used to save the bags things came in because I could remember what they'd held, where they'd come from, and throwing them away felt like tossing scraps of my own memory--myself--away.

Part of me--the part that has never seen Hoarders--thinks I might have had the right idea...

Grown-Up Reactions to Kid Lit: The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson)

My friend MK is a high-school librarian, so both of us read a pretty remarkable amount of kid lit. In this maybe-semi-regular-feature, we discuss it!

Jilly: First thoughts on this one?

MK:  Well, one of my first thoughts for this one is that we have the opposite problem with our narrator, who reads as older than 12 to me for most of the book.

Jilly:  Totally agreed. I'd put Percy at about 14

MK:  Yup. Especially since they make such a big deal of his dyslexia/problems in school early on (which I realize are later explained by his brain being wired for ancient Greek or whatever)—his vocabulary is awfully expansive.

Jilly:  I mean, with boys developing more slowly, generally speaking, he could have been 15, with his vocab, his punning, his proto-sex-drive. I feel like he and Annabeth were being set up as eventual love interests (in the series) and their awareness of all that felt older than 12

MK:  Actually that was the part the felt the most authentic to me-he teases her for having a crush on Luke, but I don't think there's sexual tension between the two of them at all.

Jilly:  I don't think they have sexual tension yet; I think they're being set up to develop it later.

MK:  I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. I just think he's completely unaware of it, in the way that tweens can still be friends-ish with the opposite sex.

Jilly:  That's fair. You don’t think her crush on Luke felt more 14-ish? I felt like Annabeth's vibe was generally older, which increased my sense that Percy felt older, too. Like the anger with her dad could have been 15 for me.

MK:  Well, you said it yourself- she seems older because she's a girl. I think their relative maturity levels make sense.

Jilly:  I think they do, but she felt older to me AS a girl. Anyway, we can agree that the kids these days, they grow up so fast.

MK:  Hahahaha. Yes.

Jilly:  What did you think of the characterization of the myths and the gods etc.?

MK:  I liked it, but I also got this sense of "This will go PERFECTLY with our unit on mythology!"

Jilly: Percy's recall of all the myths sometimes felt a bit forced

MK:  YES. Especially from someone who is flunking tests on the subject!

Jilly:  I can't imagine ANY 6th grade class going into that much depth with mythology, either. That level of memorization is high school or older to my mind

MK:  I also found the "misunderstood troublemaker finally finds his place" narrative not overly believable, because the place turned out to be "among super intelligent nerds."

Jilly:  Yeah. The ways that he made trouble honestly felt more like the accident-prone kid than anything

I think part of that was Riordan playing to his audience of, presumably, 10-year-olds

MK:  Yes.

Jilly:  Like "HAHAHA HE DID WHAT???" But if that kid were in a classroom, I think most teachers' response would be exasperation, but they'd try to work with him. They'd also understand that a kid with dyslexia would need a different class load -- I mean, he was clearly attending private Manhattan schools. I find it hard to believe that his dyslexia would be allowed to totally dive-bomb his education at places like that.

MK:  Well right. They don't get any money if they kick him out.

Jilly:  All of this is definitely adult quibbling though; I doubt many 10-year-olds would be bothered by any of it, and it doesn't significantly impact the book, it's just some of what I see as a string of "convenient short-cuts" the author makes. Like a trope of YA is that authors want to get their kids not to have to deal with modern technology, because it's too awkward for them to manage.

MK:  Well, it also dates your books more quickly.

Jilly:  True. Anyway, Riordan had a good enough reason for that work around, but I feel like a lot of his explanations for those things--the "I just need to get the kid to place X or to not have thing Y around"--were a bit "convenient." Sorta like "meuh, good enough, let's get back to the underworld."

MK:  That's fair. I felt like he was doing The Odyssey for 12 year olds, but only some of the time.

Jilly:  Do we think the book will get kids into mythology in general? I feel like it could - it does make the myths feel human

MK:  I feel like it gets kids More into mythology if they already have an introduction. I just think it's introduced as sort of intermediate level knowledge.

Jilly:  What do you mean?

MK:  Like, Percy is "remembering" a bunch of stuff from class, but some of it seems like "Oh, we all know who Zeus is."

Jilly:  Oh, that's fair. Yeah, and for gods like Hephaestus, that sort of "duh, we all know THIS guy" thing is asking a lot.

MK:  Exactly. And I think references can get readers interested in learning more, but if there's a base level of understanding you need to even Get the reference, that's either frustrating or you ignore it completely.

Jilly:  Right--you skim right past it and never find that myth, or even think to want to. Like the Aphrodite cabin is only referenced as being monstrously vain.

MK:  Yeah, we definitely get the PG version of Aphrodite and Bacchus.

Jilly:  No joke. The Diet Coke? C'mon now. All of that said, I feel like it sounds like we didn't like this book, but I thought it was pretty charming.

MK:  Hahaha. Yes, it's very readable.

Jilly:  I especially loved that Percy wasn't Zeus's kid, which is what I expected.

MK:  Okay but how annoying was it that it took pretty much the whole book for him to figure out he has power over water? JUST GET IN THE DAMN WATER.

Jilly:  RIGHT? It was like, "I made a fountain move, then I somehow made pipes spit water on my enemies, then I felt immediately healed in water, and yet no one, truly no one, can determine who my god-dad-or-mom is."

MK:  "Weird, I get this strange feeling every time I'm near water...  must be a coincidence."

Jilly:  I guess I chalked that up to the author wanting to give his readers a mini-mystery they could definitely solve. Like the sense that they got it, YESSSSS! CALLED THAT ONE BRO!

MK:  Now I'm imagining a bunch of 10-year-olds reading it at the same time and being super smug. "Oh, you haven't figured out who his dad is yet?"

Jilly:  I mean...I would've been that 10-year-old. ATHENA CABIN TILL I DIE!

MK:  Hahahaha. By the way, knowing that there are a bunch of half-bloods running around, they sure give those assholes a lot of leeway for capture the flag.

Jilly:  no joke. That summer camp is a liability NIGHTMARE.